Cian O'Donnell

'They saw them on their dishes when eating': The mushroom making people hallucinate dozens of tiny humans Only recently described by science, the mysterious mushrooms are found in different parts of the world, but they give people the same exact visions.

With most psychedelic drugs, you never know what you're going to get. But this mysterious mushroom from China - without fail - causes users to hallucinate tiny people: crawling up walls, popping out from under furniture and marching under doors. www.bbc.com/future/artic...

There's no such thing as complete precision here anyway. Research excellence and value is always subjective to some degree

Infant brain categorizes common objects by two months of age Brain activity patterns in the ventral visual cortex appear to distinguish images across 12 categories, including birds and trees, fMRI scans suggest.

The Transmitter writes about @clionaod.bsky.social's work with
@ainedineen.bsky.social, @annatruzzi.bsky.social, Graham King, @lorinanaci.bsky.social, Keelin Harrison, Enna-Louise D'Arcy, Jessica White, @chiarac.bsky.social, Tamrin Holloway, Anna Kravchenko, @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social!

Strong dislike for this view that bland, formulaic scientific writing is desirable. I mean, we have to read this stuff, give us some flow

Scientists: science is the opposite, it should just be about the thing, not anything else or worse, everything else

I love Edward Gorey’s theory of art:

“Art…is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating.”

Great list... I'd only add: dealing with arseholes 🙃

You find out in any service/hospitality job that 10% of all people are unpleasant human beings... see it when you're driving, see it in the workplace etc

Reading people. Body language. Knowing how to connect with people totally unlike you and with different backgrounds and beliefs. Defusing tense situations. Gaining trust. High endurance, pain tolerance, and work ethic. Reaction time. Prioritizing order of execution. Anticipating people’s needs. Tons

is it an overstatement to say that the person who gets this job could set the path for the UK politics and economy for the next decade

Do you think there are any generalisations to be made here from satnav usage effects on navigation, to GenAI usage effects on other cognitive tasks?

Londonderry: Another stuck bus sparks calls for better signs A crane had to free the coach from the city's steepest street - four weeks after it last happened.

there is a very steep hill near us which turns onto a high street, we and many others drive kids to school via it every day. One morning we saw a Belfast-Derry coach get wedged turning off it, had to get craned out! Apparently a new bus driver was following satnav 🤪

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

How do people end up following their satnavs into danger? The experts have their say after an Amazon delivery driver got stuck in mudflats this week.

My comments on the impact of GPS on our brains.
Not all bad, but the consequences can be bad, as in the case of this amazon delivery driver!

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

@niallw.bsky.social pointed out an error in a preprint of ours that contained a fabricated citation. The cause: we used Claude to fix an arxiv upload / compile error. It decided the best way to do that was to remove an actual citation and replace it with a fabricated one.

bsky.app/profile/ben....

I specifically created the Research Assistant role as there are few paid research roles pre-PhD, and many great potential scientists can't afford to work for free. I'd love to hear from candidates from low socioeconomic backgrounds who are interested in going to a PhD.

If you want to tackle the "biggest problem holding neuroscience back right now" - comparing mechanisms of cognition across species - join us in @ox.ac.uk and @tcddublin.bsky.social . Please share!

3x Job Details below:

(fantastic article @suthanalab.bsky.social ) #neuroskyence #neurojobs

Despite being eligible to vote for members of the Irish Seanad (upper house) as a member of the "higher education" constituency I am instead boycotting in protest a) at the elitist and anti-democratic eligibility criteria; b) the fact that the whole thing should be abolished anyway

I just did the dumbest thing of my entire career to prove a much more serious point.

I tricked ChatGPT and Google, and made them tell other users I’m a competitive hot-dog-eating world champion

People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I’ll explain how I did it

Innate A leading neuroscientist explains why your personal traits are more innate than you think

Can I recommend this great book by @wiringthebrain.bsky.social on exactly this topic
press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

New preprint from the lab on synapse development in the nascent neocortical hierarchy!

Using mice that label MAGUK proteins developed by Seth Grant we find key differences in the laminar maturation of association and sensory motor cortices, including delayed, cortex-wide maturation of L1 synapses.

Region- and layer-specific glutamatergic synapse development in the nascent cortical hierarchy https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.17.706315v1

A screenshot of the CRU-TS national time series dashboard

New dashboard to visualise CRU-TS country averages (i.e. CRU-CY) for temperature, precipitation, humidity and drought area (using our scPDSI indicator).

(It takes a little while to first load, but is quite responsive after that)

climate.uea.co/CRU-Timeseri...

I don't think anyone can realistically say eg a mouse is autistic.

My view is that animal models of autism can at best aim to replicate some aspects of brain development common to human autistic people... understanding these can give us clues about human condition

Full Adder Circuit – How it Works A Full Adder is a digital circuit that performs the addition of three binary inputs. Here you will learn the basics of this logic circuit.

Depends on the level of abstraction your'e aiming for but would an adder circuit be the sweet spot?

www.build-electronic-circuits.com/full-adder/

Historian of medicine here. Yes. Yes, they did.

I'm *guessing* (because totally unclear) that a Reform UK govt would mean, for unis in England:
*No more Student Loans access for Arts and Hums outside Oxbridge, UCL, Durham, Exeter, handful of others
*V limited Social Science undergrad loans
*No more Arts and Humanities Research Council (1/3)

I've been at a couple of SFARI meetings and have to say they have done a great job of encouraging the human and animal autism researchers to talk to each other and focus on aspects of autism that lend themselves to cross-species study

Neuroscience has a species problem If neuroscience is serious about building general principles of brain function, cross-species dialogue must become a core organizing principle.

The biggest problem holding neuroscience back right now isn’t data or tools, thanks in large part to the BRAIN Initiative.

It’s fragmentation across species. I wrote this to hopefully spark discussion around an issue that can only be solved as a community👇

www.thetransmitter.org/animal-model...

Thrilled to finally share this work! 🧠🔊

Using a new reinforcement-free task we show mice (like humans) extract abstract structure from sound (unsupervised) & dCA1 is causally required by building factorised, orthogonal subspaces of abstract rules.

Led by Dammy Onih!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Excited to launch Principia, a nonprofit research organisation at the intersection of deep learning theory and AI safety.

Our goal is to develop theory for modern machine learning systems that can help us understand complex network behaviors, including those critical for AI safety and alignment.

1

Duration between rewards controls the rate of behavioral and dopaminergic learning - Nature Neuroscience Cue–reward learning rate scales proportionally with the time between rewards. Consequently, learning over a fixed duration is independent of the number of trials. This challenges trial-based dopamine ...

Very excited to post our paper led by @daburke.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41... where we uncover a simple mathematical rule underlying how brains learn that a cue predicts a reward. 1/26